Launched in November 2015 and now with over 100 million USD in funding, Dedao is one of the fastest expanding app/service in China and SouthEast Asia. The app provides paying users with a library of popular books summarized into 30 minute, quality podcasts with transcripts. On a mission to help users conquer “a book a day, 365 books a year”, Dedao is quickly capturing the money and attention of millions of people.
This app is particularly revolutionary because of its timing. For the hundreds of millions of new smartphone / internet users from smaller cities, towns and rural villages in China, the first wave of apps to be adopted were fun, social apps like Douyu (live streaming) and Weibo (microblogging). However, there is an increasing trend for this gigantic group of users to move to apps with more intellectual substance. With a full suite of social features, Dedao has the ability to draw the intellectually curious away from other platforms and build a learning community. With the right audience, the company will be in a great position to become an educational platform to democratize knowledge for everyone.
Dedao inherits a lot of the user experience and design from its fun, social counterparts. One can get similar feeling to choosing, viewing and commenting on a live stream when using this app. A particular feature that I find well designed is “series”. Dedao builds book series based on recommended reading lists from public figures. It also adds well written introduction/description and landing pages so that users can share them to their network through other social media apps. For Dedao’s targeted audience, sharing what they are reading is similar to showing off a nice vacation or dining experience on Instagram.
Three Features to Improve Dedao:
- Discussion Forums — Increase Stickiness:
Dedao should build discussion forums surrounding user created topics for each podcast/book. Chat based social interaction is great for real time conversations. However, for deeper, thought provoking discussions that others might find interesting later down the line, a Reddit (app) style discussion page would be useful. The main success metric to look for would be average increased minute spent in app and discussion forum as well as number of postings per user. This can be measured through A/B testing discussion forum for smaller group of users - WeChat Integration — Increase Virality
Because Tencent (WeChat’s parent) is a large investor in the product, there should be a way to integrate what someone is listening to inside the messaging app as a status. This would be similar to Spotify’s integration with Facebook (previous) and Tinder. Users who add this integration to their WeChat account should be rewarded depending on number of new sign ups. The main success metric here would be the number of app downloads and number of new subscription through integration. This can be easily tracked through referral links. - Enterprise Accounts — Increase Revenue:
Every company encourages their employees to learn new things but few provide actual lessons or trainings. Dedao can sell their service to companies as employee benefit for their employees. Dedao would also need additional content for particular vertical (e.g. exclusive machine learning podcast series for a tech company). The success metric here would be revenue growth through enterprise accounts taking into account existing users who unsubscribed with this new feature.
Other Product to Check Out — Wispform
Check out Wispform, a free website where you can build beautiful, conversational, forms and surveys using an easy powerpoint style interface. You can find it at www.wispform.com.
